At Home on Hendrik

An awful lot has been going on around Chez Hendrik in the past few weeks, but we’ve been terrible bloggers about actually reporting on it.

First up was the snow back on 2 February! We woke up to a FULLFOOT of snow on deck! We’re not really prepared for such amounts here, so we had to break out our rambling boots and use our squeegee to clear a path to the door (to actually get the saloon door open, too).

So the cold and wet have obviously slowed all our exterior work, so we’ve been pushing hard the past few weekends to finally finish up the Captain’s Cabin for rental as well as convert what’s now James’s temporary wardrobe (1 1/2 hotel rooms) into a temporary bedroom for us. I think we can safely say we’ve bought all the supplies now (save the worktop for the kitchenette) so what’s left is just putting it all together.

James has been putting his new tools to good use (at some point he’s going to show them off to you, he says) and has been busy installing the new plinth heaters in the Captain’s Cabin. One is going into the base of the sofa in the lounge there:

And the other is going at the foot of the bed in the bedroom, into a plinth being purpose-made for it:

These hook into the boiler (via a new pump that’s on order so both sides of the boat will be independently heated) like a normal radiator, but have inverted fans to blow the warm air into the room. Since we were upheaving so much to get these in, we quickly borrowed a sheet of Celotex off Steve and Lorna to put down on the floorboards to minimise heat loss, then a bunch of pegboard on top of that in the sofa base to minimise damage to the Celotex (as the base will still be a useful storage spot). James has also run the Hep20 to all the right spots and drilled the holes, ready to hook everything up…

The other biggie is that we went out and bought new carpet (remnants) for the entire Captain’s Cabin, wheelhouse, and probably enough to make our temporary bedroom a bit cozier, too. The carpets were cheap, but we went for the super-insulating, draft-proof underlay after having cold feet all winter, which wasn’t. But the more winters you live on a boat, the most you come to value good insulation, so we think it’s worth it.

Here’s our new additions in the saloon, while we wait for the wheelhouse floor to dry and our hairball-prone cat to stop going back there:

And myself? Well, I’ve been concentrating mostly on getting the old wardrobe into working order as a bedroom, so I’ve been hacking away at old radiator and cold water pipes. The latter aren’t too bad, but the old radiator pipes are gross – lots of viscous black stuff pouring out of them despite draining the system and there never being any radiators down in the hotel rooms anyway (arrrgh)!

So hopefully with a few more weekends we’ll have a few Completed rather than In Progress shots to show off…